Tag: Apple Watch (page 1 of 2)

First, HomeRun now provides the option to set different complications to appear on your watch face throughout the day during select time periods. You can, for example, tell HomeRun that starting at 6:00am every day, you want its complication to trigger your ‘Good Morning’ scene, then at 8:00am it should instead trigger your ‘I’m leaving’ scene, and at 5:00pm it should change to activate ‘I’m home’. Not only will the action change, but the complication itself will visually transform at the time you’ve programmed.

If you have the nagging feeling that your Apple Watch should be better at triggering HomeKit scenes, check out HomeRun. You can add customized complications to your Watch face, and this latest update allows those complications to change based on the time of the day.

iOS 12 added some great functionality to Do Not Disturb, including the ability to set Do Not Disturb for an hour, until the evening, or until you leave your current location. Since my phone is silent and I get all notifications through taps from my Apple Watch, I can ignore most distractions pretty easily. As a result, I never bothered to activate DND when entering a meeting or starting a phone call on my office phone.

The introduction of the Walkie-Talkie app in watchOS 5 changed all this. Walkie-Talkie messages from a pre-approved contact blurt out from your Watch, unless you’ve either activated DND or changed your availability in the Walkie-Talkie app. I’ve started activating DND for an hour before I make phone calls on my office phone, but what I really need is the ability to set DND for a brief period of time.

Control Center can be rearranged. This is a minor change, but one that you will probably use once and then never again. At the bottom of Control Center is an “Edit” button that allows you to shift these buttons around however you’d like.

Newly released watchOS 5 is full of little tweaks like this one in Control Center. If you want a comprehensive list of the additions and changes, this review is a must-read. It’s thorough, but also very skimmable if you want to use it as a reference.

Just at the event itself in the post-show hands-on area, I spoke to several people in their 40s or 50s who said the same thing: they were already considering buying Series 4 watches for their parents for this feature alone.

I fall into that “40s or 50s” crowd, and Gruber is right on target. During the Watch portion of the Apple event, I thought of my late grandmother. She was always spry and active, until she suffered a fall while alone. She was never herself again. After thinking of her, I immediately thought of my parents, who are also spry and active. It’s amazing that the technology is there to help with such a real problem. I’m just not sure they’d wear a Watch consistently. It’s a talk we’ll be having.

I’m trying to come up with a concise list of improvements to the Apple Watch, to evaluate whether it is worth an upgrade. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far. Granted, much of this comes from press releases, so it isn’t really intended to be an objective evaluation.